A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin; edited by Stephen Emerson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 403 pages; $26). The prose in this posthumous collection — raw, nervy, compassionate — is like no one else’s, leading us through ordeals by turns funny, tragic and filled with strange grace.

— Joan Frank

Books of 2015

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 289 pages; $26). A young man embarks on a quixotic mission to re-establish his inner-city community in this uproariously funny and deliciously profane satire.

— John McMurtrie

The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions; 473 pages; $18). Ferrante, in this fourth and final novel in her Neapolitan series, shows much skill in writing enormous histories into a narrative about two women choosing the paths their adult lives should take.

— Scott Esposito

The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth; 332 pages; $25). In Marra’s extraordinary collection, a complicated web of careworn lives unspools over the course of nearly a century in a bruised and oppressive Russia.

— Alexis Burling

NONFICTION

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan (Penguin Press; 447 pages; $27.95). The New Yorker staff writer revisits his surf obsession in this evocative and profound memoir.

— Antoine Wilson

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel and Grau; 152 pages; $24). Coates’ searching interrogation of America’s enduring racial myths and inequities is an essential clarion call to our collective conscience.

— Pamela Newkirk

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau; 366 pages; $28). Leovy has written an unsentimental and evenhanded account of the multigenerational dynamics plaguing our nation’s ghettos — and the senseless killings that routinely occur in them.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press; 300 pages; $26). Macdonald’s grief memoir is a work of extraordinary insight and expression, intimate and truthful without straying into needy confessionalism.

— Maggie Shipstead

Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, by Pamela Newkirk (Amistad; 297 pages; $25.99). Newkirk’s important book retells the little-known and devastating tale of a young man who, only a century ago, was captured in the Congo and put on display in the Bronx Zoo Monkey House.